In this post, you will find great Narrative Quotes from famous people, such as Johann Johannsson, Leslie Jamison, Brent Faiyaz, Annie Dillard, Daniel Cameron. You can learn and implement many lessons from these quotes.
We don’t have a lot of narrative on TV or film, mainstream film, of brown queers. Latina queers, I can’t think of that many.
The thing I always tell my writing students – I’m not a full-time instructor, by any means, but periodically I’ve taught writing students – what I always tell them is that the most important thing in narrative nonfiction is that you not only have to have all the research; you have to have about 100% more than you need.
We like long-form narrative journalism, and we feel there aren’t enough high-profile outlets in Canada running the kind of stories we want to showcase – long, meaty, thoughtful, investigative.
Whether politicians are dealing with complex policy problems or trying to communicate with the electorate, it makes sense to establish a clear, long term narrative underpinned by forward-looking policies to deliver on its vision.
I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative.
One of the things that defines YA is a really strong narrative. Adults love YA because, at the end of the day, they’re good stories and page-turners. The other element is emotion. The teen years are a very emotional and intense time, and I think it’s a time we that we can all relate to and remember.
Sometimes as writers, we try and put narrative development above character development. We try to move our characters around like chess pieces that do our bidding. The problem with that is sometimes the characters do things they shouldn’t do. Things that are inorganic.
Once I got into college, I discovered literature – in particular, multicultural literature. I just started to understand the power of story and narrative, and you know, like anyone else, I kind of wanted to do it, too.
A denial of the reality of demonical possessions on the part of anyone who believes the Gospel narrative to be true and inspired may justly be regarded as simply and plainly inconceivable.
Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it’s necessary for the characters to change.
In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.
Every work of history is a combination of argument and narrative. The longer I write, the more I emphasize the narrative, the story, and the less attention I give to the argument. Arguments come and go.
It’s important to acknowledge the danger when we provide an academic venue for racism. It’s interesting to hear people push the, quote, ‘free speech‘ narrative in this way. They deny the speech of the people who disagree.
I read a handful of memoirs to get a sense of what the genre meant. I needed to learn the fundamentals of the craft. I had never written a word of narrative. What is a tense shift, what is point of view? I didn’t know any of it.
Separation in culture and arts does nobody any favors except for the people in power. That’s just it… So I feel like I’m in the business of challenging that narrative.
I’m the first transsexual fighter in MMA. Like, ever. It’s always going to be part of the narrative, but I’ll deal with it. I’ll try my best to use it to my advantage.
I’m interested in discontinuities and interruptions, people having to rewrite the narrative of their lives because of sudden changes.
In my mind, there’s usually a fairly definitive kind of narrative when I write. But I don’t want to enforce that on other people. I think that’s why I like using metaphor so much.
If you need to fudge the facts a little bit to make your narrative work, there is nothing anyone can do to stop you.
In history, one gathers clues like a detective, tries to present an honest account of what most likely happened, and writes a narrative according to what we know and, where we aren’t absolutely sure, what might be most likely to have happened, within the generally accepted rules of evidence and sources.
For narrative games, and also for the sake of the medium, we have to treat performance that way, as actors. You have to have a sense of ownership over it and believe that you’re bringing something meaningful to it – because that’s what all of the developers are doing, and that’s what the story demands.
I see a lot of myself in a young Mike Vrabel. He is very competitive. He is very respectful of the game, but he looks at each opportunity as an opportunity to prove something that people don’t think you can do, and he’ll create that narrative.
What interested me was the story of Bennet Omalu. You hear his narrative: Immigrant from Nigeria, landing in Pittsburgh, only to learn and tell the truth about this most American – and sacrosanct – cultural institution: the NFL.
A continuing narrative throughout Australia’s history that says it is better to build up than to tear down – this is the continuing mission of Labor.
I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.
Fiction is optimistic or unrealistic enough to demand that there should be a meaningful narrative.
Well, if storytelling is important, then your narrative ability, or your ability to put into words or use what someone else has put into words effectively, is important too.
As conservatives, we know the media is stacked against us. We know popular culture is often stacked against us. We know the narrative has been written without our voice despite our best efforts.
The ‘Grace of Kings’ isn’t a narrative about a return to some golden age, to a lost status quo ante. It portrays a dynamic world in transition, where the redistribution of power is messy, morally ambivalent, and only lurches toward more justice.
There is commerciality in storytelling, even in a film or a piece of literature. These things exist. That’s why stories came to be: to hold attention and, while you’re not looking, you’ll get hopefully some nutritional value that the author has been working up. That’s narrative; that’s passing stuff down.
Through the potent example of his own life, President Obama enabled us to believe the best about America, and, therefore, about ourselves. That uplifting narrative – essentially equating the promise of America with his extraordinary life story – swept candidate Obama into the presidency.
I do love Shirley Jackson, but I don’t deserve to be named in connection with her. I remember reading ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ and having goosebumps for hours. The way she builds narrative pressure in that book is just amazing. I think you could reread it a few times and actually go out of your mind.
There’s not one black narrative. There’s not one way to be black.
It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.
Before you can challenge a received narrative about the past, you should be expert in its established contours.
Growing up, I mostly read comic books and sci-fi. Then I discovered the book ‘Jane Eyre’ by Jane Austen. It introduced me to the world of romance, which I have since never left. Also, the world of the first-person narrative.
I don’t know how video game narrative works.
A big part of the anti-immigration narrative is the perception that the majority of immigrants are poor, uneducated, and unskilled.
Fiction is supposed to be immersive and supposed to be entertaining and narrative, so structures have to be buried a little bit. If they come foregrounded too much, it stops being fiction and starts being poetry – something more concrete and out of time.
I totally accept that it’s a legitimate criticism that when you are involved in the day-to-day scrum of government… that what can get lost is the narrative, the hymn sheet… the song that inspires and lifts people’s sights.
I think that rap is narrative, when it’s done right.
Documentaries can provoke much more than narrative movies.
If we were writing what the fans wanted to see, Betty and Jughead would be the most linear, monotonous narrative of all time.
I did try to write stories in college because I was interested in writing, and I was interested in the sound of language, but I was just no good at narrative and at fiction.
As I get older, I’m looking more and more for films that are actually about something rather than just narrative vehicles.
Video games as a storytelling medium are, from a mathematical standpoint, a branching narrative. You start at one place, you can go in multiple different directions, and there’s a multitude of different endings.
Women often get ignored from main narrative, especially in films.
I think one of the things that happens with, especially in the criminal justice system, is that the prosecutor is able to control the narrative from the very, very beginning. The moment an arrest is made, they put out a press release to the media and the media follows that narrative.
True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.
I write in reverse: Rather than come up with a narrative and write jokes for that narrative, I write jokes independently of the narrative, then I try to fit them in.
Day 1, when I was drafted to the Toronto Raptors, they had this stigma on them: Every guy leaves. Nobody wants to be here. Superstars, nobody wants to play in Canada. From Day 1, my whole mindset and approach to the game, being in Toronto, was I wanted to change that whole narrative to that whole organization.
You have to be careful about over-politicizing the utterances of people of colour because, oftentimes, there’s poetry that seeks to go beyond that narrative.
Suspension of disbelief is a necessary ingredient in all storytelling. So it has been with the government’s narrative that it is delivering Brexit.
As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative – as watching someone else’s story – and much more toward enacting one’s own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.
National Standards was not a narrative of past events but was leftwing revisionism and Political Correctness.
When I was growing up, I never saw couples fight on the family sitcoms I loved to watch. Subsequently, when tough times arose in my own relationship, I wasn’t prepared and felt so isolated and alone. Marital issues weren’t a part of the narrative that television told me was a ‘working relationship.’
There’s a bit more of a safe distance when you’re making a narrative movie, a bit more perspective. Audiences can separate themselves from the harsh reality of the facts a little bit more and think: ‘Okay, how do I consider this?’
Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.
80-percent of ‘Enter the Void’ is a traditional narrative movie. I suppose it’s more similar to ‘Jacob‘s Ladder‘ or ‘Videodrome’ than it is to ‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome‘ by Kenneth Anger, which is very experimental. It’s the other 10% of 20% that reminds you of the language and glamour of dreams.
I know what the narrative is on me. It’s because I come from money and I have a swagger and confidence about me.
Lots of people do stand up shows with no narrative, but I love a beginning, a middle and an end.
Every song in ‘Groundhog Day’ works to forward the story in a chronological, narrative sense, to illuminate the state of mind of the person singing it and comment on the world.
I think the media has portrayed conservatives as these cold, heartless people who want poor people to die and let half the population starve and all this. They’ve done that so effectively because they’ve owned the narrative for so long.
People always said during the Monday Night Wars that the only way we were able to compete was due to a large checkbook and deep pockets. That’s not very true at all. That is a false narrative designed to shape history. WWE had significant advantages over WCW and vice versa.
Marriage fascinates me: how we negotiate its span, how we change within it, how it changes itself, and why some relationships survive and others do not. There isn’t a single marriage that couldn’t provide enough narrative arc for a novel.
What is wrong is wrong but there has to be a layered narrative. And that is what makes ‘Mahabharat’ timeless. People find its characters realistic. They could see their reflection in people even today.
Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more – the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible.
‘Happy Valley’ is an extraordinary piece and it was not necessarily about Catherine but her part in the narrative.
My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.
Simply put, the Internet undermines the ability of an institution to control its own narrative.
Instead of going to a GLAAD event and standing on a soapbox, I am writing roles that I feel will change the narrative and open doors.
The world for our law enforcement community has changed dramatically: everything from filling out paperwork to relationships with the community and how they think the narrative is in the media.
During his brilliant campaign, President Obama wove a powerful narrative about the American we all hope for. And that hope was grounded in a very powerful reality: President Obama’s own inspiring life story.
It’s great that I can look up a fact instantly on my cellphone, but I miss the days in my room with a dog-eared, text-heavy paperback, immersed in the statistics of crime and punishment and lunacy, completely alone with the narrative of human depravity.
As the coding movement continues to grow, the common narrative of the white male geek as the predominant influencer on geek culture will erode.
As Christians we need to be patient, understanding, and kind. Instead of going on the attack, we can ask genuine questions. Instead of bristling when our narrative is summarily dismissed, we can carefully explain our way of seeing things. And when we are wrong, we won’t be afraid to say so.
There’s what we call the ‘critical path,’ which is the main story line and all the missions that you have to do to complete the narrative arc of the game. Then there are side quests. They’re not essential to completing the game.
The body of work I create combines traditional storylines and postmodern narrative strategies to approach themes such as belonging, identity politics and conflict, as well as the push towards – and resistance against – modernization.
Strong female characters – even if they don’t necessarily make the same decisions that we might – make such great narrative material, especially when there’s an equally strong male character in the mix.
I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer’s creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen.
That decision to commit your life to certain principles and a certain narrative, if I wrote a paper on that, I know I’d find inconsistencies.
I stopped making videos and commercials for a few months before I started films just to reset my clock because so much narrative filmmaking is a sense of tempo and rhythm.
I always wanted to be a scientist, I always thought I’d be a scientist, that was the narrative I was carrying around. I worked in a neuroscience lab as an undergraduate and then after, almost five years in total, but I realized I just wasn’t good at science. I didn’t have the discipline for it.
In both law and politics, I think the essential battle is the meta-battle of framing the narrative.
There is a narrative of ‘Washington fighting‘ because it’s interesting and it’s drama.
Because I write fiction, I don’t write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as ‘I’ – you are inhabiting that ‘I.’
I think what happens normally in a narrative film is that the camera constructs the reality.
There are so many different narrative traditions across the world, and each of those traditions has evolved dramatically over time. Once I understood that, I felt truly free; I could write and invent the way I wanted to because there never has been only one way to tell a good story.
There is something about musical narrative and Australians. If you want to do something, you kind of have to do it at a level – because we’re so far away from everywhere else – that exceeds what is just normal if you want to convince people that some guy from Australia is worth backing for an original musical.
‘Two’ is not written in the usual style of a novel. It’s a straightforward, linear narrative of my times, as I observed partition, and is told through multiple characters.
Unlike economics, whose sole preoccupation in our finance-obsessed era is the near-term profit motive, history offers a way to place our tiny lifespans in a narrative that spans dozens of generations – perhaps even reaching into a future where capitalism is no longer our dominant form of economic organization.
If you look at photojournalism, it’s largely driven by current events… always chasing a crisis or disaster. I follow a narrative that is much looser than current events.
I had never thought that I would be involved in narrative structures. As a young guy, I was more interested in abstract modeling. But as I got older, I began to see that there was no reason to limit myself to any intellectual or conceptual postulate, when in fact I’m a professional student of music.
When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.
If you’re a photographer, you end up being the raw creative force that allows other people to see what kind of narrative you want to be giving or what kind of art that you want people to see.
There’s a classic medical aphorism: ‘Listen to the patient; they’re telling you the diagnosis.’ Actually, a lot of patients are just telling you a lot of rubbish, and you have to stop them and ask the pertinent questions. But, yes, in both drama and medicine, isolated facts can accumulate to create the narrative.
Plots are artificial. Does your life have a plot? It has characters. There is a narrative. There’s a lot of story, a lot of character. But plot? Eh, no.
At the heart of any successful film is a powerful story. And a story should be just that: a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, powerful protagonists that audiences can identify with, and a dramatic arc that is able to capture and hold viewers‘ intellectual and emotional attention.
That inner narrative – the desire to understand the way I am – never really switches off.
What’s important is how the character drives the narrative.
First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.
What really motivates you to try to work things out as an actor is in large part fear, because you want to get into that narrative and bring the audience along.
I do fashion to tell a narrative.
We are in this amazing age of television where there’s an incredible amount and an incredible quality of television, of long-form narrative.
I do think that the abiding mystery of my origins has definitely had a profound effect upon my writing. There is that thing in the back of my mind where I think I don’t really know who I am. And it may make it a little easier to shift around in my narrative voice.
Today, Labour has a disruptive economic narrative – that Britain needs fundamental change in its market structure and culture to compete in the modern world.
Look, there’s no question that we have a challenge with gun violence. But there’s a lot more nuanced parts of that narrative, and that’s the part that I think that we have to make sure that we emphasize along with all the great things that are going on in Chicago, particularly in our neighborhoods.
Try this experiment: Pick a famous movie – ‘Casablanca,’ say – and summarize the plot in one sentence. Is that plot you just described the thing you remember most about it? Doubtful. Narrative is a necessary cement, but it disappears from memory.
Storytelling is storytelling. You still play by the same narrative rules. The technology is completely different. I don’t use one piece of technology that I used when I started directing.
In the United States in the 20th century, every major event that America was going through, there was a boxer who seemed to symbolically represent it, from slavery to the Vietnam War to the Depression – all the way along, you just seemed to have boxers that carried the narrative.
What, after all, is the narrative of ‘the American Dream?’ It was a discourse formulated between the 1880s and the 1920s in the United States during the great waves of migration and expansion and reforms of the Progressive Era.
When we get to a point when trans folks are included in the creative process, the narrative will be much more authentic. Trans actors playing trans roles is a key part of that. But some of the trans talent is not even making it into the audition room, let’s be honest.
My background with acting is deeply interwoven with my family life and my childhood. It’s a ‘Peter Pan’-like narrative, something that was golden but could also be a bit dubious.
At the heart of every faith system is a bargain: on one side there is the comfort that comes from a narrative that suggests human life has cosmic significance, and on the other a duty to yield to moral commands that can, in the moment, seem rather inconvenient.
As the cinema is changing, on-screen kissing, love-making scenes are becoming part of the narrative. I am not saying it is wrong, because it is the reflection of how our society has changed and become comfortable with it. But I am uncomfortable performing it on screen.
The narrative related to economics is, I think, very well understood even by the common man.
I avoid continuously writing or tweeting about ISIS, as it centres them in the narrative and we end up reacting to them and reacting to the agenda they set.
My idea in terms of managing a narrative, or in thinking in my creative life, is that you could easily argue that the past, the present and the future all occur simultaneously, and if you can postulate that, then you’re not strictly bound to a linear narrative.
The narrative needs to change. Asian-American actresses don’t want to be the damsels in distress anymore. We don’t want to be saved, especially by a white man.
Partnerships are good engines for narrative.
I love to dress up and create a narrative with my look.
‘One Hundred Years of Solitude‘ is a masterpiece because it is an episodic novel that has a rigorous form – an unprecedented combination. From the very beginning we know the town of Macondo will endure only a century, so there is a limit to the length of the narrative.
I think it’s really easy to be the altruistic hero of your own narrative and story.
I hear music as narrative.
There’s a narrative out there about Republicans being not just anti-illegal immigrant, but anti-immigrant. It was very important to me to break the narrative.
There’s something about that puritanical narrative of progress and upward mobility and work ethic that the glorification of abstinence fits pretty neatly into. That pairs with the fact that 12-step recovery has had too large a monopoly on how treatment is understood in America.
Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.
I’m interested in taking hold of the dull truth narrative and finding inside it the transcendence and spirituality and hysteria normally associated with religion.
Mr. Rogers would not make a good protagonist of a narrative film. He’s without conflict, he’s too far along on his journey toward enlightenment to be a good protagonist. Our protagonists have to be struggling with demons in a certain way.
I knew how to write like an academic, so I knew how to write academic papers and essays and things. But the things that are great for an essay are unbearable in narrative writing.
The writing is only ever the attractive thing about a part. And also if all the elements within the writing come together – the character and the structure and the narrative – if they are all there then you become excited.
Writing for a film means the music has to serve the film, the narrative.
A great thing is happening on cable TV. You see characters change in stories over years, like in Tolstoy. That’s a whole, thrilling new form that I really enjoy. They are Tolstoy-an in their endless character development and narrative changes… a show like ‘Breaking Bad‘ is astonishing.
Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.
You can’t but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it’s a narrative art form.
One reason I find all this character growth and narrative swerving so exhilarating is because I never got to do it when I wrote for TV. Our characters needed to remain consistent from week to week.
No other powerful public figure in the history of American media has controlled his narrative as effectively as David Stern.
It’s really important for me to have a record which has a strong narrative feel to it.
Migration gives a blank cheque to put anything you don’t feel like addressing in the memory hold. No neighbours can go against the monster narrative of your family.
As an actor I can bring the story, the narrative in each performance. If I can’t do that, then… might as well give up as an actor, hadn’t I?
Ninety percent of the research comes first. I mostly blunder around reading stuff and talking to smart people until an idea batters or oozes its way through to my narrative brain.
It’s hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you’re ultimately the author, so you do have control.
Dominant narrative is so overwhelming in politics. The smallest gaffe when the momentum is against you is a disaster. But when it is with you, everyone just ignores it.
Narrative is so rich; it’s given up so much.
You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.
Each country has its own way of communicating a narrative and, through that, expressing family experiences in emotional stories.
We are all at the center of our own narrative, but it’s a narrative that changes every time we retell it.
Without sounding too pretentious, I was sort of a slave to the narrative. When the narrative cracks in, I have to go where it takes me. I had to go to the Bohemian Grove. It was the obvious end to the book.
I think there is this narrative that if you are a black woman, and you are strong, and you are educated, it’s like, ‘Good luck getting a black man.’
This impeachment narrative started before President Trump was even nominated to the Repub – as the Republican candidate.
Brands‘ products should be the manifestation of a company‘s values. Those values should be the subject of all sorts of wonderful stories that comprise your company’s narrative.
I will say this: I’ve always sort of had maybe an inflated sense of my ability to sequence songs in a narrative flow.
‘Kiss Land’ is the story after ‘Trilogy‘; it’s pretty much the second chapter of my life. The narrative takes place after my first flight; it’s very foreign, very Asian-inspired. When people ask me, ‘Why Japan?’ I simply tell them it’s the furthest I’ve ever been from home. It really is a different planet.
Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.
‘Betsy’ is one of my favorites because it is the one to which I’ve imposed the least clear narrative. To me, it’s so much more about the feeling – desperation – than any kind of story at all. There’s very little imagery or character development; it’s just about a deep and desperate search for something.
If I really believe that visual representation and narrative are ways to convey important, complex ideas, and if the world is gravitating toward this form, then geez, I better do it myself. I want to do it myself.
As a reader, I notice political views regardless of whether or not the book is fiction. What annoys me is when said views do nothing to advance the narrative.
Our history is our own; it’s not America’s. Too often, those who campaign against racial inequality import wholesale a narrative and assumptions that have nothing to do with this country’s history and have no place on these islands.
Considerations of plot do a great deal of heavy lifting when it comes to long-form narrative – readers will overlook the most ham-fisted prose if only a writer can make them long to know what happens next.
Any time you write history, you insert your opinion. You pick and choose what you are going to write about. I feel really happy not inserting myself. I spend too much of my life inserting myself. It’s just great to let other people carry the narrative.
Films like ‘Velvet Goldmine’ are an accumulation of research and references. I create an almost random resource of connections and am constantly distilling that into narrative specifics.
I’m not really afraid of things that are imaginary. I enjoy it. I enjoy big narrative, and I enjoy big feelings. Having a feeling is never going to kill you.
Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.
I have a passion for academic life, a passion for students and for the ability and the narrative of a university to make a difference in the world in which they reside.
What I’m really proud of Beyonce and Solange, they understand the importance of creating the narrative. It’s all about the narrative and how you position yourself with your narrative.
Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative.
Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That’s how you focus the world. It’s the only reason you should ever try this writing job.
Crafting a piece of gripping, narrative true crime that engages the world is not that different from crafting a piece of crime fiction.
The pattern of the narrative never of necessity wants to end, it never has to.
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.
Myself, there’s people saying, ‘He’ll never find himself in the halls of WWE.’ It’s a narrative that’s fueled more by secondhand fan myth than what people feel.
What you’re trying to create is a certain kind of an indispensable presence, where your position in the narrative is not contingent on whether somebody likes you, or somebody knows you, or somebody’s a friend, or somebody’s being generous to you.
If you are making a script based on a book it can be frustrating going back to the source novel, because you’re turning the story into a totally different thing; the narrative of film is different from that of a book.
If I have a collection of songs for an EP or mixtape, I create the narrative afterwards; but usually with an album, I have a concept and the name first.
And the narrative for the Taliban that they can wait us out is a flawed narrative. I think that the unambiguous international support for Afghanistan has been a very powerful message. You know, that was the message that came out of the NATO summit. We will not abandon Afghanistan.
The narrative of ‘man the hunter‘ presupposes that men provided the nutrition, invented the tools, and established social organization and communication through the hunt, and that women were just sitting by the fire waiting for evolution to drag them out by the hair in the 1960s in order to participate.
The narrative of so many fairy tales are timeless in so many different cultures, and they have been since the dawn of man. They represent escapism, but they all feature themes that have such poignancy in a modern world.
A. S. Byatt is a writer in mid-career whose time has certainly come, because ‘Possession’ is a tour de force that opens every narrative device of English fiction to inspection without, for a moment, ceasing to delight.
The Rafale deal narrative that the Congress is setting is a propaganda that has international ramifications.
Instead, I was interested in what I guess I could call narrative indeterminacy, in questioning the apparent, taken-for-granted authority of any particular representation of the events in question.
Cable television is such a part of our society now. Oftentimes, the shows are really good, and you’re just like, ‘Well, it’s worth sitting through the sex and violence because the narrative is so great.’
In fact, the only way to inspire people to embrace change is through setting a narrative and telling a story. It can be central to innovation and change, and at the same time it can preserve tradition and memories.
It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader’s opportunities to follow it at every step.
We can all be cornered and victimized and bullied by someone who’s trying to take our contextual clues of our personality or appearance, the circumstantial, and trying to make that evidence to fit their narrative. That’s very scary.
It’s unfortunate people can twist and turn things to fit whatever narrative they’d like it to fit.
Our identities really are a constant negotiation between the story we tell about ourselves and the narrative our societies like to recite.
My view of an excellent novel was probably set in the golden age of fiction in the 19th century: narrative, character and voice are of equal importance.
Nefertiti is lovely, but we should use our wit and will to look beyond that beautiful face to discover and to enjoy a more satisfying narrative – the story of mankind, not just of man.
Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.
The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
Historically speaking, the books I usually connect with the most are written in first-person narrative.
I did grow up in a household where the narrative was about public service and how are you going to effect change and help people. I’m so glad I grew up around that narrative, but I never had the calling to go out and shake hands and try to get elected.
Let me be clear: I unequivocally support a two-state solution as the path to resolution of the Israel and Palestinian conflict, with Israel as the national homeland for the Jewish people. Moreover, I reject the demonization and de-legitimization of Israel represented by the BDS narrative and campaign.
Music is the subliminal connecting adhesive in film, or at least in narrative feature films.
The genre of narrative business books that I love so much – the ones that have a you-are-there quality – was invented, or so it is said, in 1982 by David McClintick, who wrote ‘Indecent Exposure,’ a rollicking good read about a Hollywood scandal and the ultimate boardroom power struggle at Columbia Pictures.
We are moving beyond the non-fiction novel to different kinds of narrative art, different forms of cognition. Loaded with moral and political point, narrative has been recalibrated to record, honour, and protest the latest historically specific instance of futility and mess.
‘Rapper’s Delight’ came from the TV entertainment show ‘Good Times,’ but when the times called for a shift in the narrative, artists answered, covering brutal truths in their rhymes that were uncomfortable for society to confront.
Theater is great because you’re able to tell a narrative arc without a break. I think it’s more about the material and whether what we get offered is good.
I’ve spent most of my life embracing violence in wars and revolutions. Even a famine is a form of violence. Because I photograph people in peril, people in pain, people being executed in front of me, I find it very difficult to get my head around the art narrative of photography.
Believe it or not, one of the things I try to do around here is try to look for opportunities to work with people across the aisle. I know that’s not the common narrative. But the truth is if you want to get anything done, that’s an absolute requirement.
I love it when people take contemporary songs and find a narrative or a theatrical way of telling it.
Over the years, I learned that in my career, unlike in life, sometimes my wheelchair is its own automatic door opener. I was able to win the OWN competition by applying one simple principle: be funny, and admit you suck before anyone else can call you out on it. In other words, make the narrative of your failure a comedy.
I started out writing music for theatre and contemporary dance, so there has always been a dramatic and narrative element in my music.
When you’ve grown up with limited resources, there’s almost a narrative that everything’s unlikely and the odds are against you. I guess then, if things start to happen, you immediately think, ‘Do I even deserve this?’
I start with a mood or an idea that comes from a personal place emotionally, and the narrative concepts come much later.
The only books I give up on are texts where the writer’s attention is concentrated so heavily on narrative questions that his or her use of language becomes careless.
Television has been breaking narrative rules.
I think there’s a lot of people in their dingy boats in the middle of the ocean pining for the days of closed-ended narrative.
I always tend to think, even in residential projects, about what a space is being asked to do – where is it located, what are the circumstances, where can I attack the problem, so to speak. How can you create a narrative for people moving through it? How can you convey its character?
In the future, I think movies are going to be more of data sets that viewers have a hand in controlling – where the narrative originates and what happens to the content.
I’d like to be on ‘Graham Norton.’ Just because I used to do the audience warm-up for the ‘Graham Norton’ show, and I just think that would be a beautifully lovely, typical end to a narrative. I like a neat ending.
The human brain has evolved the capacity to impose a narrative, complete with chronology and cause-and-effect logic, on whatever it encounters, no matter how apparently random.
Most of my films have been documentaries, but I’m also very interested in narrative filmmaking.
Once we truly grasp the message of the ‘New Testament‘, it is impossible to read the ‘Old Testament‘ again without seeing Christ on every page, in every story, foreshadowed or anticipated in every event and narrative.
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
As far as what I do, my value as a writer is certainly not to try to recapitulate a 19th century form. Certain styles of narrative don’t conform to my style of experiencing the world.
Music is a very physical experience, and I need to understand things physically to be able to create the narrative for them.
It’s what people have always done. They have always told stories, put on plays. It’s characters and narrative and thought and context and resolution so you reflect the way the world is in some way. It comes out of experience. I think it’s OK to do that.
The gender is irrelevant; the identity is the one you should try and create for yourself by yourself, and the narrative of your own life becomes your own book.
I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare‘s sonnets.
In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings.
A central task for any campaign is to develop a narrative: a short, simple story explaining where we are, how we got here and where we need to go.
A narrative that branded Africa as little more than an economic, political and social basket case was not likely to provide the investment needed to drive development.
It’s very rare for the Internet to have a successful narrative show like ‘MyMusic.’ It’s really a case study for what is the future of the sitcom.
It’s no new narrative to say that when people get out of child stardom, they oftentimes rebel in very serious ways.
I think my narrative is actually pretty interesting if I step back from it and don’t engage too much in it, personally or emotionally.
I am a sucker for that childhood romance narrative.
Things have character. So I’m interested in how the character of the thing might function as a protagonist in what isn’t a narrative.
You have to understand: the narrative that people have about business and capitalism is that they are fundamentally selfish, greedy, and exploitative. Of course, I don’t agree with that narrative.
Political dictatorships take possession not just of money and belongings but of narrative.
The experience that a publication creates for its audience is the very essence of that publication’s brand – and without deep engagement, that publication’s brand will be weak. A good publication is a convener and an arbiter – it expresses a core narrative that becomes a badge of sorts for its readership.
Art, whatever form it takes, requires hard work, craftsmanship and creativity. As a writer, I know my grammar, cadence, the music of prose, and the art of the narrative.
Storytelling is powerful; film particularly. We can know a lot of things intellectually, but humans really live on storytelling. Primarily with ourselves; we’re all stories of our own narrative.
Part of the reason I wanted to write a novel was that in fiction I could do something that’s difficult to do in real life, which is to dwell on the stark details of the experience without really needing to create that narrative of redemption.
In the digital universe, our personal history and its sense of narrative is succeeded by our social networking profile – a snapshot of the current moment. The information itself – our social graph of friends and likes – is a product being sold to market researchers in order to better predict and guide our futures.
I’ve been a radio reporter for ten years, and if I learned anything from my time at ‘This American Life,’ it’s how to craft a narrative so that even if the ending is ambiguous, it is somehow satisfying.
The repetition of the victimhood narrative is really poisonous for young people because they hear it and believe it.
Narrative has been part of human consciousness for a long time. And if it has played a part in all those thousands of years, it will know a trick or two. It will be wise. It will be mischievous. It will be helpful. It will be generous.
The most important thing in games isn’t the designer’s narrative, but the story the player creates through his experiences.
It’s a common part of the narrative of the history of Christianity that it was ‘real’ religion that involved real spirituality and real faith, and that’s why it’s completely superseded the more pagan polytheistic practices.
I wanted to write a book about poverty that wasn’t only about the poor. I was looking for some sort of narrative device, a phenomenon that would allow me to draw in a lot of different players. I was like, ‘Shoot, eviction does that.’
If readers tell you that stretches of dialogue or narrative were too long, that they couldn’t tell who was talking, that’s something that can be fixed.
One of the most unsettling things about ‘Monologue‘ is its long silences, in which the man sits alone, staring into the middle distance, without grip of his narrative, lost to the past.
I suffer from and enjoy an incredibly vivid dream life. A lot of times there is a sort of narrative, and other times they are just funhouses of non-linear imagery and other scary stuff.
There is a real danger of unintended consequences, of encouraging people to give up. Pessimism, if it becomes a habit, can reinforce a narrative of unstoppable decline. If there is nothing we can do, that releases us from our obligations.
I can’t be bothered with narrative. It takes too long for me to try to think of it.
Allowing alternative narrative modes in popular entertainment may seem obvious, yet when you turn a pilot into the people upstairs and the main character isn’t after what she wants by the top of page two, you get treated as if you’ve failed at writing.
To reconstruct stories and scenes, nonfiction writers must conduct vigorous and responsible research. In fact, narrative requires more research than traditional reportage, for writers cannot simply tell what they learn and know; rather, they must show it.
What’s become a big theme in my music is my dad as a narrative character. I never had the opportunity to understand our relationship in a more adult capacity. The unknown is great material for any creative outlet.
George Orwell‘s ‘1984’ frequently tops surveys of our greatest books: it’s not a celebration of poetic language. It’s decidedly anti-literary, a masterpiece of personal and political narrative sequence. And its subject matter is crucial, because what ‘1984’ shows is that language can be a dirty trick.
Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data.
While we can all access articles and information in so many places now – across blogs, in newspapers, on video – there is something very powerful about putting it all together into an edited format in a single issue that has a narrative stretching across the themes.
Every masculine hero narrative I could find I wanted to steal for myself and twist to my size.
My purpose is to make my narrative as truthful as possible.
I think our everyday coded language around ‘good neighborhoods’ and ‘bad neighborhoods’ is what allows for tremendous violence to happen… When you label a neighborhood ‘bad’ and avoid it, then you don’t know and don’t see what goes on there. And there’s no human face to interrupt that narrative.
I feel the political failings of the U.S.A. are presidential in length, but the aspirant narrative of the States is millennial in length.
Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that’s the point to step back and fill in the details of their world.
Oftentimes, as women and women of color, we are put as supporting characters in other people’s narratives. With ‘Jessica James‘, she is the star of her own narrative.
It irks me when I read the narrative that ‘Dwane is salty.’ I can’t say anything right.
First of all, I don’t dislike direct storytelling – people seem to think that about my games! Actually, the truth is, I’m just not good at implementing direct narrative in my games.
For us, since we entered the MCU as storytellers, and we picked up the story with ‘Winter Soldier,’ we’ve been carrying a thread forward from that point, a narrative thread.
We need a new and positive narrative that defies the negativity and transforms our ageing populations from a problem into an asset.
The idea of having a narrative guiding the viewer through and grasping their attention is a really compelling thing.
One of the things that’s important about family is the narrative history they create for themselves.
I love the freedom that the narrative form provides.
The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.
At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.
I was swept by the narrative structure of film… you can create a world, you can destroy it, you can do what you want with it and serve it to people just the way you like.
Well, I think it’s important to have some kind of a narrative engine that pushes the audience through the landscape. But I love films like ‘Apocalypse Now,’ which is a very mood driven film. It’s a magnetic force that’s pulling them through.
I don’t just want my books to be about the ’30s and ’40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as ’40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.
The properties of people and the properties of character have almost nothing to do with each other. They really don’t. I know it seems like they do because we look alike, but people don’t speak in dialogue. Their lives don’t unfold in a series of scenes that form a narrative arc.
My personal narrative – I was lucky early on in my career to have some really strong mentors. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that’s what really built me up.
Any narrative, whether it’s fiction or not, you have to approach it as though it really happened to you. I think that’s the only way to get inside the characters and make the narrative work. It’s a storytelling tradition, and I think to come off as genuine then you have to really approach it that way.
We have a whole industry which is gigantic: games. Games is very successful. It’s its own art form, though, and it’s not the same as a linear narrative.
Referring to ISIL as a destructive religious cult rather than a legitimate theo-political ‘radical Islamic’ group is not just more accurate, it also exposes ISIL’s corrupt religious narrative.
Ideally, writers and narrative designers should be included much earlier in the process, where they can be of most benefit. However, although the industry is slowly getting used to fitting narrative professionals into games development, we’re still going through a bit of a ‘square-peg in a round hole‘ phase.
Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
Movies have these transcendent moments where everything is just right, from the dialogue to the music to the lighting to the narrative context; everything is just perfect, and something magical happens – the film breaks through the screen and does something to you.
The GOP doesn’t seem particularly afraid of being perceived as blocking reform, despite efforts by the Obama White House to establish that narrative.
Generally speaking, we as black people have been celebrated more for when we are subservient when we are not being leaders or kings or in the center of our own narrative driving it forward.
Contemporary paganism gives me a subjective lens through which the world in which I live can be interpreted on an aesthetic and an ethical basis. I’m interested in narrative, myth, and story, in folklore and the way we connect to the turning of the seasons and the natural world.
It’s pretty inappropriate of fans to think they can expect any kind of narrative from showrunners or writers or actors. I just don’t think that’s the way you should engage with material that you’re watching as a passive audience member.
As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.
While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.
As an author of narrative history, I read a lot of history books.
If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it’s O.K., but it’s of no account.
I’m looking for a charismatic character – somebody who you just want to look at and listen to and whom the camera likes. I’m also looking for a narrative arc: Something is going to happen, and there will be a question that will make you wonder what happens at the end.
Fashion is this obsessive narrative that people don’t understand but they can’t stop looking at.
The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn’t true of my life, though I’ve experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.
I think people forget how radical the narrative of ‘Slacker’ is. There’s no story, you know? We could go from one character to the next to the next and never return.
The unsaid is a powerful tool. It invites the reader into the narrative, filling in gaps, interpreting silences and half-finished sentences, and seeing the hidden fear in someone’s eye.
Autobiography is awfully seductive; it’s wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass – the slave narrative – speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying ‘I,’ meaning ‘we.’
Memory doesn’t come as a straight narrative. It comes in small moments with all this white space.
I’m not a new-agey person, but narrative is ancient and wise and generous.
I don’t start with a list of historical scenes that I want to include in the book. At a certain point, the narrative totally takes over, and everything that I include I can only incorporate if it answers to the internal terms of the novel.
The two have to go hand in hand – the atmosphere and the music. I actually get rather worried if I can’t see the music first. There always needs to be a mood, a feeling, a story, even if it is abstract. There’s got to be a narrative to guide things before they’re even created.
Personal narrative is one of the few things where people don’t get caught up in fighting over esoteric rhetoric.
It’s always important not to fall for the narrative of the terrorists. If you want to fight for getting a normal life back, you also have to participate.
‘Main Hoon Na’ will always be special since it was my first film but in my subsequent films, I was trying to show off with gimmicks that didn’t aid the narrative in any way.
Truth may be stranger than fiction on a plot and narrative basis, but fiction can investigate tone in a way that things based on a true story can’t.
‘Fast Food Nation’ isn’t about my journey into the dark world of fast food and the prison book is not about my journey into the prison world. I’m not using myself as any kind of narrative link.
It’s very easy, if you come from a place like Pakistan, to imagine that there’s a narrative of American aggression towards the place that you come from. But that, in itself, is just a political view.
Anytime you look at someone in detail, you’re putting the camera on that person. What I typically look for is one or two or three really strong characters who will hold the narrative throughout the work.
